While Moore's Law for increasing computer chip transistor density won't go on for more than another 20 years it is still happening. Intel introduced 32 nanometer chips in 2009 and will introduce 22 nm chips in 2011. The New York Times reports on Rice University and Hewlett-Packard researchers who have developed 5 nanometer logic devices.
These chips store only 1,000 bits of data, but if the new technology fulfills the promise its inventors see, single chips that store as much as today’s highest capacity disk drives could be possible in five years. The new method involves filaments as thin as five nanometers in width — thinner than what the industry hopes to achieve by the end of the decade using standard techniques. The initial discovery was made by Jun Yao, a graduate researcher at Rice. Mr. Yao said he stumbled on the switch by accident.
Will spinning disk drive capacity grow fast enough to remain competitive? Or will solid state drives start replacing spinning disk drives for mass storage?
Handheld computers (mobile phones, music players, games, etc) benefit much more than desktop or even laptop PCs when memory becomes much smaller. But here's what I want to know: What are you going to store in your future cell phone's 4 terabyte memory chip?
EAST LANSING, Mich. -- A city’s size no longer is the key factor in building vibrant local economies, according to a study by a Michigan State University sociologist.
Zachary Neal found that although America's largest cities once had the most sophisticated economies, today that honor goes to cities with many connections to other places, regardless of their size. The study was published online Aug. 30 in the research journal City and Community.
The rise of commercial aviation, high-speed rail, the Internet and other technological advances have allowed smaller cities to compete with urban powers such as New York and Chicago, Neal said. The study identifies Denver, Phoenix and even Bentonville, Ark. – Wal-Mart’s corporate home – as some of the most well-connected and economically sophisticated communities.
Air travel started the trend. Low cost communications further accelerated it. What I wonder: How essential is the air travel? Will very high res teleconferencing substantially reduce the need for business air travel?
Neal examined the population and air-traffic data for 64 U.S. cities from 1900 to 2000. He found that a city’s population was the most important factor for its economy until the 1950s, when the spread of commercial air travel fostered more cross-country business networks. That trend continued with advances such as teleconferencing and the growth of the Internet.
To the extent that high speed internet and very high res 3-D video teleconferencing can reduce the need for air travel the communications technologies will also open up economic development to smaller cities and towns that are not near airports. Any place where enough brain power can concentrate will be sufficient to build up an industry.
Want to live a long long time and get rejuvenation therapies? First avoid dying in an air accident in a less developed country.
HANOVER, MD, September 1, 2010 – Passengers who fly in Developing World countries face 13 times the risk of being killed in an air accident as passengers in the First World. The more economically advanced countries in the Developing World have better overall safety records than the others, but even their death risk per flight is seven times as high as that in First World countries.
These results come from research by Arnold Barnett, a prof at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Click thru and read the details if you plan to fly outside the most developed countries.
What is surprising: even countries like Brazil and Taiwan have only Developing World levels of safety, not the much better safety records of the most developed countries. So if you plan on flying to developing countries take First World airlines.
Rent-a-womb is a big international business in India.
You can outsource just about any work to India these days, including making babies. Reproductive tourism in India is now a half-a-billion-dollar-a-year industry, with surrogacy services offered in 350 clinics across the country since it was legalized in 2002. The primary appeal of India is that it is cheap, hardly regulated, and relatively safe.
Note this combination: Hardly regulated and safe. I bet surrogacy dad Patri Friedman is not surprised.
Once it becomes possible to create eggs by turning adult cells back into stem cells even women in their later 40s and later will be able to have biological children using surrogacy. Many women who spend her 20s and 30s making lots of money will find surrogacy an attractive proposition.
So what do you think of surrogacy? Acceptable between consenting adults? If not why not?
More shopping or less church attendances reduces happiness?
BEER-SHEVA, ISRAEL, August 31, 2010 – A new study conducted by a Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researcher, together with a researcher from De-Paul University, reveals that women in the United States generally derive more happiness from religious participation than from shopping on Sundays.
Additionally, the repeal of "blue laws," which allow stores to open on Sundays, has a negative effect on the level of religious participation of white women and therefore has a negative impact on their happiness. Interestingly, the authors did not observe any significant decline in reported happiness of other groups whose religious participation was not significantly affected by repeal.
I wonder whether the groups whose religious participation didn't drop also didn't shop as much on Sunday.
Reinstitute the ban on Sunday shopping in order to boost happiness by a substantial amount?
The research also reveals that when Sunday blue laws are repealed, women who choose secular activities, such as shopping, are not happier. The repeal of blue laws decreases the relative probability of being at least "pretty happy" relative to "not happy" by about 17 percent.
Did you know that the happiness of women has been on the decline for 3 decades? Women's liberation, movement into the workforce, divorcing their husbands (women initiate most divorces by a substantial margin), sexual liberation, and other changes have not made them happier. This guy thinks lifting of Blue Laws made women less happy.
According to Dr. Danny Cohen-Zada of BGU's Department of Economics, "We found that there is direct evidence that religious participation has a positive causal effect on a person's happiness. Furthermore, an important part of the decline in women's happiness during the last three decades can be explained by decline in religious participation."
Think about the evolutionary roles of hunter men and gatherer women. When shopping was illegal on Sundays the effect was to force women to take a break from gathering. Maybe the inability to act on the shopping instinct actually provides a relief, an ability to rest one's mind and enjoy what you already have.
Or maybe the problem for the gatherer woman with cash and credit card is that gathering is too easy with too many things for her to choose among.
The ability to easily satisfy immediate desires comes at the expense of long term satisfaction.
The authors speculate that respondents did not return to attending church as much even after they noticed that they were happier before the repeal because of a problem of self-control or the need for immediate satisfaction.
"People choose shopping, like watching TV, because it provides immediate satisfaction," Dr. Cohen-Zada explains. "That satisfaction lasts for the moment it's being consumed and not much longer than that. Religious participation, on the other hand, is not immediate. Instead, it requires persistence over a period of time."
We humans are no longer in our Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA). Since we are not adapted to the environments we have created with technology we need to look for signs of how we could modify our current environments in order to make us better adjusted and happier with our current environments.
A study published today in the scientific journal Addiction argues that privatising Sweden's government monopoly on the sale of alcohol will significantly increase alcohol-related violence and other harms. Depending on the type of privatisation, experts predict that total alcohol consumption in Sweden will increase by 17 - 37%, with thousands more alcohol-related deaths, assaults, and drunk driving offences per year and up to 11 million more days of sick leave.
Does the state of Pennsylvania still operate state liquor stores?
One study finds longer life expectancies among moderate drinkers.
They found that moderate drinkers tended to live longer across a 20-year follow-up compared to heavy drinkers and teetotalers. Mortality risk was 42% higher for heavy drinkers and 49% higher for abstainers than moderate drinkers.
Another finds moderate wine consumption correlates with better brain performance.
A large prospective study of 5033 men and women in the Tromsø Study in northern Norway has reported that moderate wine consumption is independently associated with better performance on cognitive tests. The subjects (average age 58 and free of stroke) were followed over 7 years during which they were tested with a range of cognitive function tests. Among women, there was a lower risk of a poor testing score for those who consumed wine at least 4 or more times over two weeks in comparison with those who drink < 1 time during this period The expected associations between other risk factors for poor cognitive functioning were seen, i.e. lower testing scores among people who were older, less educated, smokers, and those with depression, diabetes, or hypertension.
It has long been known that "moderate people do moderate things." The authors state the same thing: "A positive effect of wine . . . could also be due to confounders such as socio-economic status and more favourable dietary and other lifestyle habits.
It could be that people who control their drinking also make other wise decisions on their health.
If alcohol really does deliver a health benefit then how? A few possibilities are mentioned.
Such effects could relate to the presence in wine of a number of polyphenols (antioxidants) and other micro elements that may help reduce the risk of cognitive decline with ageing. Mechanisms that have been suggested for alcohol itself being protective against cognitive decline include effects on atherosclerosis ( hardening of the arteries), coagulation ( thickening of the blood and clotting), and reducing inflammation ( of artery walls, improving blood flow).
My guess is that some subset benefits from alcohol while another subset is harmed. I'd like to see a prospective study where blood lipids, inflammation, stress hormones, and other indicators are looked at before and after starting moderate alcohol consumption. Perhaps some people experience a reduction in stress and inflammation as a result of consuming alcohol while others are harmed and still others already have low stress and low inflammation without using alcohol.
If you ignore surveys in the mail and hang up on surveyors on the phone your genes are telling you to do it. Next time a phone surveyor calls up I'm going to tell them "My genes compel me to hang up on you". So I've got that to look forward to.
A new study from North Carolina State University shows that genetics play a key factor in whether someone is willing to take a survey.
“We wanted to know whether people are genetically predisposed to ignore requests for survey participation,” says Dr. Lori Foster Thompson, an associate professor of psychology at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the research. “We found that there is a pretty strong genetic predisposition to not reply to surveys.”
For the study, the researchers sent out a survey to over 1,000 sets of twins – some fraternal, some identical – and then measured who did and did not respond. The researchers were interested in whether the response behavior of one twin accurately predicted the behavior of the other twin. “We found that the behavior of one identical twin was a good predictor for the other,” Foster Thompson says, “but that the same did not hold true for fraternal twins.
Naturally I wonder what that propensity to ignore surveys correlates with. What faction of politics or culture is being missed by surveyors? What kinds of people do you think are least likely to answer surveys? What other traits does this propensity track with? Shyness? The tendency to be a loner? Independence? Resentment of authority? Lack of charitable feeling?
Also, are the people who won't answer phone surveys the same as the ones who won't answer mail surveys? Phone's a lot more invasive and personal. So phone surveyors might repel a different subset of humanity.
A short period of excess food consumption can have long term effects on your body weight and fat storage even after the initial weight is lost. A study published in BioMed Central's open access journal Nutrition & Metabolism has found that a four-week episode of increased energy intake and decreased exercise can cause increased weight and fat mass more than two years later when compared to control individuals.
Åsa Ernersson worked with a team of researchers from Linköping University Sweden to investigate the long term effects of a sedentary and gluttonous lifestyle. They capped the physical activity of 18 individuals and used excessive food consumption to increase their energy intake by an average of 70% for four weeks. A separate control group ate and exercised as normal.
A long vacation pig-out could have long term consequences.
A very interesting result: The overeating group experienced a long term shift to higher weight.
The intervention group gained an average of 6.4 kg in body weight, which was mostly lost 6 months later. However, one year later the intervention group showed an increased fat mass compared to baseline; the differences were even greater after two and a half years. Ernersson said "The long term difference in body weight in the intervention and control groups suggests that there is an extended effect on fat mass after a short period of large food consumption and minimal exercise."
What I want to know: is there some way to recalibrate one's metabolism permanently toward a lower weight? Or is human metabolism ratchetable only in one direction?
I also wonder about actors who gain weight for a part. Did Renee Zellweger have a tougher time staying emaciated after she played Bridget Jones?
Do you feel special? So special that you think you live in a unique time? Andrew Stuttaford thinks vanity is behind the belief of many people who believe they live in the end time or in the time where great disaster will befall us.
I’ve long suspected that amongst those who believe that the apocalypse is just round the corner, a certain vanity may well be at work – the belief that their time is somehow special.
Stuttaford points to a Scientific American article on why humans have a tendency to believe they live in a special end time: it is all about the desire to feel special.
The desire to treat terrible events as the harbinger of the end of civilization itself also has roots in another human trait: vanity.
We all believe we live in an exceptional time, perhaps even a critical moment in the history of the species. Technology appears to have given us power over the atom, our genomes, the planet—with potentially dire consequences. This attitude may stem from nothing more than our desire to place ourselves at the center of the universe. “It’s part of the fundamental limited perspective of our species to believe that this moment is the critical one and critical in every way—for good, for bad, for the final end of humanity,” says Nicholas Christenfeld, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego. Imagining the end of the world is nigh makes us feel special.
To feel special is to feel one's status is higher. That's a fundamental human need. On a related note see my post Mickey Foley: The Doomer's Curse about why people wish for a disastrous end to our current civilization: the desire for higher relative status. You can also listen to me interviewed about this in KMO's podcasts Got Status? and The Success Trap.
Natural selection bequeathed us many cognitive flaws that cause our emotional needs to distort already flawed and very limited reasoning faculties. Only a small fraction of the human race is smart enough to create the scientific and technological civilization that makes web logs and social networking sites possible. Even that smart fraction has lots of cognitive flaws that prevent an accurate assessment of our situation. I hope our cognitive flaws do not eventually lead us into creating an extremely special disastrous situation. I prefer boring progress and the only special thing I really want is a fully rejuvenated body.
Will a 3% per year growth in demand for anesthesiologists in the United States outrun supply?
A recent study from the RAND Corporation, one of the country’s most trusted analytic organizations, finds a current shortage of 3,800 anesthesiologists and 1,282 nurse anesthetists. However, if current trends continue, a dramatic shortage of anesthesiologists and a significant surplus of nurse anesthetists are projected by 2020.
This brings up some questions that I do not have answers for. But the questions are pretty interesting and worth investigating:
- Is it necessary today to have 1 anesthesiologist per operation? Or could a small number of anesthesiologists monitor many operations with the help of software and assistants? How hard would it be to develop software and equipment that would enable anesthesiologists to handle many operations at once?
- How long until software can do as good of a job as anesthesiologists?
- What are the prospects for reducing by anesthesiologist demand by speeding up operations? For example, is duration of surgery shortened by current generation robotic assist surgical equipment such as the da Vinci surgical system? Will future robotic surgical devices operate autonomously much faster than human surgeons can?
- Will rejuvenation therapies result in an increase or decrease in demand for surgeons? For example, will stem cell therapies decrease the demand for surgeries more than installation of grown replacement organs will increase demand for surgeries?
- Will effective cancer cures via, for example, nanotech-based precise cancer cell killers reduce the overall demand for surgery? Or will avoidance of death from cancer (and elimination of need for cancer surgeries) just make people live longer to need many other kinds of surgeries?
To put it another way: Should a 20 year old today choose surgery or anesthesiology as a career path? Are these safe bets? Or are they at high risk of getting heavily automated in the 2020s and 2030s?
The RAND researchers expect a 3% yearly increase in demand for anesthesiologists. That results in a doubling in 24 years. My guess is that at some point in those 24 years demand will peak and then start contracting due to automation.
In its baseline projection, assuming demand for services grow at the rate of 1.6 percent annually for both anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists, the RAND study projects a shortage of close to 4,500 anesthesiologists and a surplus of close to 8,000 nurse anesthetists by 2020. However, if the growth in demand is assumed to be 3 percent to account for the aging population, the RAND study projects a shortage of physician anesthesiologists as high as 12,500 by the end of the decade. In this likely scenario, the surplus of nurse anesthetists by 2020 could be as high as 15,000.
The really highly paid and high skilled occupations are not immune to automation. Given that medical costs in the United States now exceed 17.35 of GDP and are on course to surpass 20% of GDP it makes sense to heavily automate the most expensive tasks in medicine. We can not afford the current trend in medical expenditures. Thing's got to give. What policies could increase the rate of automation of medicine?
An experimental drug designed to block the effects of a genetic mutation often found in patients with malignant melanoma, a deadly cancer with few existing treatments, significantly shrank tumors in about 80 percent of those who carried the mutation.
Click thru and read all the details.
A small percentage of the patients experienced disappearance of tumours. But do not expect it at a doctor's office any time soon.
Further studies are needed before the drug can be approved by the FDA.
I find this infuriating. Once you've been given a death sentence diagnosis and have months to live why should you have to die without being able to try experimental treatments?
Stage IV metastatic variety of melanoma has a 5 year survival rate below 20% and even lower in some cases. Malignant melanoma diagnosis amounts to a check-out notice from the Life Hotel. Such check-out notices ought to entitle you to a "Get out of the FDA jail card" where you get to try experimental treatments.
Personalities of married people do not converge. Since personality types are so stable this result is not surprising. But it cuts against a mythology about marriage.
The researchers analyzed the data of 1,296 married couples, one of the largest such studies to date, said Humbad, MSU doctoral candidate in clinical psychology. The data came from the Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research.
The researchers wanted to know if husbands and wives become more similar as the marriage progressed. They examined a host of personality characteristics and found that, in most cases, the couples did not become more alike with more years of marriage.
The conclusion: Spousal similarity is better explained by selection than gradual convergence.
The one exception to this pattern was aggression. “It makes sense if you think about it,” Humbad said. “If one person is violent, the other person may respond in a similar fashion and thus become more aggressive over time.”
The moral of the story: If your prospective mate has personality flaws you do not expect to be able to stand in the long run do not anticipate those flaws going away.
On a similar note, I am sure dogs and their owners do not become more like each other. Though with time fondness for a dog can become very strong even if their personalities are very unlike your own. This makes them different than spouses in a positive way.
Eating brown rice just isn't good enough.
BOSTON, Aug. 26, 2010 — Health conscious consumers who hesitate at the price of fresh blueberries and blackberries, fruits renowned for high levels of healthful antioxidants, now have an economical alternative, scientists reported here today at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). It is black rice, one variety of which got the moniker "Forbidden Rice" in ancient China because nobles commandeered every grain for themselves and forbade the common people from eating it.
Black rice bran beats blueberries for antioxidants.
"Just a spoonful of black rice bran contains more health promoting anthocyanin antioxidants than are found in a spoonful of blueberries, but with less sugar and more fiber and vitamin E antioxidants," said Zhimin Xu, Associate Professor at the Department of Food Science at Louisiana State University Agricultural Center in Baton Rouge, La., who reported on the research. "If berries are used to boost health, why not black rice and black rice bran? Especially, black rice bran would be a unique and economical material to increase consumption of health promoting antioxidants."
So you want to step it up and be even more SWPL than your friends? Black rice. That's the ticket.
How to buy the stuff? I did some web searches and the cheapest I could find is $50 total for 10 lb of Chinese black rice delivered. I make no recommendations about that site. Just found it in a web search. They also have purple sticky rice. Anyone know how it compares?
Update: See Lou Pagnucco's comment below about arsenic contamination in rice bran. Past use of arsenic as an insecticide makes rice bran a risky health proposition. Before making rice bran part of your regular diet it would be prodent to know that one's source of rice bran has been tested to not have arsenic.
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BOSTON, Aug. 24, 2010 — Continuous research and development of alternative energy could soon lead to a new era in human history in which two renewable sources — solar and wind — will become Earth's dominant contributor of energy, a Nobel laureate said here today at a special symposium at the American Chemical Society's 240th National Meeting.
Walter Kohn, Ph.D., who shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, noted that total oil and natural gas production, which today provides about 60 percent of global energy consumption, is expected to peak about 10 to 30 years from now, followed by a rapid decline. He is with the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Peak Oil is going to cause a lot of problems in the short to medium term. Why are oil companies drilling in deepwater tens of thousands of feet down? Because that's where substantial quantities of oil are still to be found. That's a sign, and not a good one.
A new energy era beckons.
The global photovoltaic energy production increased by a factor of about 90 and wind energy by a factor of about 10 over the last decade. He expects vigorous growth of these two effectively inexhaustible energies to continue during the next decade and beyond, thereby leading to a new era, the SOL/WIND era, in human history, in which solar and wind energy have become the earth's dominant energy sources.
Note that he doesn't put nuclear energy up there as the next big energy source. Whenever will fusion energy become viable?
Wind still isn't providing one whole percentage point of US energy usage. Solar's at .11 quads as compared to wind at .70 quads. So wind is much bigger than solar. Not surprising because it is substantially cheaper.
The estimated U.S. energy use in 2009 equaled 94.6 quadrillion BTUs (“quads”), down from 99.2 quadrillion BTUs in 2008. (A BTU or British Thermal Unit is a unit of measurement for energy, and is equivalent to about 1.055 kilojoules). The average American household uses about 95 million BTU per year.
Energy use in the residential, commercial, industrial and transportation arenas all declined by .22, .09, 2.16 and .88 quads, respectively.
Wind power increased dramatically in 2009 to.70 quads of primary energy compared to .51 in 2008. Most of that energy is tied directly to electricity generation and thus helps decrease the use of coal for electricity production.
Solar's cost is falling more rapidly than wind's and looks to be on path to continue to do so for years to come. So expect solar to gradually close the gap with wind.
I'm thinking Darryl Hannah's slingshot skills were passed down to her descendants and they carried out the extinction. That clan she hooked up with were already living in a cave and so cave bears were driven out onto the street (or mountain trail). The human cave-dwellers caused a homeless cave bear crisis.
"The decline in the genetic diversity of the cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) began around 50,000 years ago, much earlier than previously suggested, at a time when no major climate change was taking place, but which does coincide with the start of human expansion", Aurora Grandal-D'Anglade, co-author of the study and a researcher at the University Institute of Geology of the University of Coruña, tells SINC.
According to the research study, published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, radiocarbon dating of the fossil remains shows that the cave bear ceased to be abundant in Central Europe around 35,000 years ago.
"This can be attributed to increasing human expansion and the resulting competition between humans and bears for land and shelter", explains the scientist, who links this with the scarce fossil representation of the bear's prey in the abundant fossil record of this species.
Humans wiped out lots of species wherever they showed up. The co-evolution of humans and other species in Africa gave those species time to evolve ways to avoid death and human hands. But where humans showed up relatively suddenly other animals often didn't have enough time to evolve defenses.
Feed a fruit craving and starve your red blood cells?
University Park, Pa. — Health benefits from polyphenol antioxidants — substances found in many fruits and vegetables — may come at a cost to some people. Penn State nutritional scientists found that eating certain polyphenols decreased the amount of iron the body absorbs, which can increase the risk of developing an iron deficiency.
"Polyphenols have been known to have many beneficial effects for human health, such as preventing or delaying certain types of cancer, enhancing bone metabolism and improving bone mineral density, and decreasing risk of heart disease," said Okhee Han, assistant professor of nutritional sciences. "But so far, not many people have thought about whether or not polyphenols affect nutrient absorption."
Let me offer a contrarian spin: the people who absorb and retain too much iron (probably because of genetic variants selected for by iron-poor environments of their ancestors) might be living longer due to high-polyphenol fruits and vegetables. The polyphenols are reducing the damage done by reducing the incidence of (not always diagnosed) iron toxicity.
The researchers, led by Han, studied the effects of eating grape seed extract and epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) found in green tea. They used cells from the intestine — where iron absorption takes place — to assess the polyphenols' effect and found that polyphenols bind to iron in the intestinal cells, forming a non-transportable complex. This iron-polyphenol complex cannot enter the blood stream. Instead, it is excreted in the feces when cells are sloughed off and replaced.
Of course, if you do drink a lot of tea, eat lots of apples and grapes, and consume other high polyphenol foods you can always supplement your diet with copious quantities of steaks and hamburgers. So can't control your craving for grapes and cranberries? Got a really strong tea addiction? Treat it with red meat.
Now, maybe the whole polyphenol-iron connection is overblown. Even if so, you can still go on a high-meat Paleo Diet and think of yourself as guided by the latest wisdom in evolutionary biological thinking.
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